Advanced Affliction Warlock Guide for WOTLK

hello everyone and welcome to my advanced affliction warlock games for wrath of the lich king if you are looking for beginners tips on affliction warlock for lich king such as professions consumables enchants races and different builds i recommend you to first watch my beginner's guide for affliction warlock and lich king i'll leave a link for the description down below if you however are looking for an advanced guide on how to maximize your damage in ditch king you are in the correct place if you have any questions regarding the guide or simply want to hang out you can join my discord or catch me live on twitch.tv slash techno tv i'll leave a link for these in description down below in this video i will be talking about the most important aspects on how to maximize your damage as an affliction warlock in lich king firstly we will go in depth on how to quote-unquote roll your corruption for the maximum damage output from your corruption after that i will be addressing all the openers we can do as it's not always as simple as just having one opener after this i feel like we are prepared to talk about the rotation of the affliction warlock and how to maximize every aspect of the rotation when we have the rotation covered it's time for the most crucial aspect of the bossfight for affliction warlock which is the execute phase and more importantly how to maximize it after this is covered we'll be looking at multi-target rotations and how to maximize your dps when you have more than just one target you need to focus damage on in tier 7 this is not as relevant but it will become much much more relevant when we get into tier viii and onwards alright guys so the first topic and also one of the most crucial topics how to roll your corruption and making the most out of it alright so there is a common misconception that corruption takes your current spell power on application and then quote-unquote rolls this the entire boss fight as long as you refresh it with everlasting affliction sadly this is not the truth the way rolling your corruption works is that it takes your current crit percent and any percent damage modifiers you have on you the percent damage modifiers could for example be tricks of the trade from a rock for 15 percent more damage or the affliction talent death embrace for 12 percent more damage the way for you to gain more crit rating on pull and therefore your first corruption cast could be achieved by a numerous amount of ways like for example equipping a raw crit weapon slash offhand getting focused magic from the mage or pre-potting a potion of wild magic or destruction potion if you're still playing tbc the most important crit modifier though and often overlooked is actually a debuff on your target for five percent more crit normally corruption would act dynamic like for example you don't need curse of elements debuff before you apply corruption but for this debuff you actually need it to be active before you apply your corruption this 5 crit debuff is achieved by either improved scorch or winter's chill from a mage or the most commonly used one improved shadowbolt debuff from a warlock due to this you will never see me recommending putting up corruption on your main target until you have this debuff active at this massive for your corruption damage alright now we have the basics of what and how regarding rolling your corruption let's look at how to maximize it uh in a perfect world a mage gives you focus magic for the pull you have a crit weapon equipped you have pre-popped the wild magic you got tricks on pull and then you rip the fattest corruption known to man after the five percent crit debuff is also active on the boss often this is not the case however focus magic has much better value to be put on other casters than the affliction warlock and if you also have focus magic on pull and then the mates would swap it to another target you're making him stop casting to rebuff mid fight which isn't optimal for raid dps if you however convinced your raid to let you make a parse this could be an option starting the fight with a crit weapon is a more valid strategy however we need to keep in mind that starting the fight with a crit weapon would most of the time drastically reduce our overall player power as you are swapping in a sub-optimal weapon which most likely have less spell power and most importantly swapping weapons makes you occur a global cooldown where you cannot cast so in order for it to be worth starting the fight with a crit weapon the boss fight would have to be really long so you get massive value from it in tier 7 most fights will be over rather quickly why i don't think starting the boss fight with a crit weapon is a great option as you lose player power on pull you have a global cooldown where you can't deal damage and in late tier seven uh you're going to be able to rip like 10 000 dps as an affliction warlock so stopping dps for one second is a lot of damage lost which only could be worth it on longer fights now crit weapon and focus magic rolling is what i would consider the more niche situations so let's talk about the situations that are very common and you'd almost always have happened to you pre-popping a potion of wild magic which grants you 200 crit rating which converts to 4.36 crit pre-popping a potion of wild magic is a very powerful way to make your corruption rolling very very strong however we must once again keep in mind certain boss fights are and will be extremely fast especially in tier vii where sometimes pre-potting won't allow you to use a second potion during the fight in a scenario like that don't pre-pot and instead save your potion for the execute phase where you will use a potion of speed instead for the drain sole so for the most attractive and without a doubt the best way to roll the corruption tricks of the trade from the rogue tricks of the trade gives you a 15 damage modifier to all spells for six seconds ten seconds if they have a glyph which they do most of the time um i don't think there is any doubt that the class or spec that benefits the most from tricks of the trade on pole is the affliction warlock but this will of course not stop those other pesky classes doing what they can to be given it instead there's not much else to say about the tricks although you should be getting it on pole if your raid is looking to min max the damage the last thing to cover regarding rolling a corruption is an often overlooked aspect and that is your talent called death embrace death embrace increases your damage delta targets at or below 35 percent by 12 this effect of 12 is not applied to your corruption unless you manually reapply a corruption below 35 percent okay now that we have covered all the important aspects on how to roll your corruption let's look at the most optimal way to do it as mentioned earlier swapping weapons and getting focused magic will depend a lot on the boss fight time don't expect this to happen unless your raid or guild will cater to you the most efficient way to do it without going out of your way is to pre pause wild magic on pole getting a trick from the rogue waiting for the 5 crit debuff to be applied and then you apply a corruption now you got 15 percent extra damage on your corruption from tricks of the trade you got 4.36 more crit from the potion of wild magic this is the effect you will and should carry all the way to 35 at 35 you need another tricks from the rogue and you will manually apply a new corruption for 15 damage from tricks of trade and 12 additional damage from death embrace how ever we should once again keep in mind with applying a new corruption at 35 percent net and overall damage gain in almost every scenario it will but again certain boss fights are so short that quote unquote wasting a global on gaining approximately seven eight percent more damage on corruption from thirty five percent until the boss dies will net in dps loss okay so i have saved a little extra treat for you guys here at the end on specifically how to roll an even bigger even crazier corruption in tier 7 as an affliction warlock the first scenario on how to do this is in the raid eye of eternity where you fight malygos malygos will occasionally spawn sparks around the room if you kill these before they reach him they will splash onto the ground and cause you to do 50 percent more damage per pool on the ground which means you can stack multiple sparks and make some of the biggest corruptions you have ever seen the second scenario is thaddeus in naxxramas thaddeus will shift the polarities and you must stack with your group that has the same sign as you once you do that you gain a massive percent damage increase and you must reapply a corruption for these as they count as any other percent damage buff third scenario is of course low them when you kill a spore on lothep and gain the spore debuff you gain 50 percent more crit rating and just like on thaddeus if you do not reapply a corruption with this debuff you will not gain the 50 percent crit rating for your corruption as a little extra extra cheat it is very very strong to kill a spore near the death of a low loatheb and then take the debuff onto saffron making your corruption hit like a truck the entire saffron boss fight unless you get targeted by ice zoom of course however this might get deleted on your warcraft logs and not count but if you don't care about your logs and just want to pump as much as possible in the raid it's what i would do the bosses of uldor i want to cover in a future video as there is an insane amount of ways to min max damage on those bosses as well and it will just be way too much to cover already here so stay tuned for that video all right that was quite a mouthful about rolling a corruption i hope you're still with me so let's talk about a more chill topic your openers in my beginner's guide video i showed the highest dps opener you can possibly do but that opener is best case scenario where you get into a perfect position no one prepost the boss before the timer which let's be honest it almost never happens so let's cover the most important things on how to do your opener before you even start the precast you always want to live tap to gain the buff from the light lifetap glyph and potentially the four set from a tier vii pre-casting a shadow bolt will always be the best option for you after this it's important to remember there are certain priorities to follow and if you remember them your opener will always be strong the most important thing to remember is what we discussed in rolling your corruption segment don't apply a corruption until the crit debuff is active you have tricks from a rogue etc etc so what do you do if you can't apply a corruption before the shadowbolt lands you have a couple options depending on the boss and how well you timed your shadowball precast what is most desirable is to apply your unstable affliction instantly after you precasted your shadowbolt but the thing is shadowbolt travels slowly and unstable affliction is an incredibly fast cast so if you precast shadowbolt and then instantly cast on triple affliction it might end up in a pre-pull of the boss if it's a case of ending up pre-pulling the boss it's much better to just pre-cast shadow bolt and then get the haunt debuff off even though you have no dots up on the boss yet just to prevent you're not pre-pulling the boss what i personally prefer to do as it feels the best for me is to do the opener for the best mathematical dps and if i'm not able to do that i will time my precast shadow ball so i can instantly do unstable affliction since it feels very very bad to apply haunt before you have even applied any dots that can deal damage this may just makes your opener feel more smooth i would say when it comes to as to how to use your unused trinket ratios engineering gloves and so on the best use of them will be right after you have done your pre-casted shadow bolt so you have a massive spell power gain on your opening dots and most likely together with bloodlust which is almost always used on pole in every scenario alright now that we have covered the opener and how i prefer to do it in different scenarios let's cover the rotation of the affliction warlock dps in lich king the rotation itself is quite simple and you keep up your dots and you use your fillers i have touch up on this object in the basic fiction guide so if you want the straight basics i recommend you watch that video and then come back to this one afterwards the best way to min max your basic affliction warlock rotation is how you use your haunt if you're casting haunt as soon as it's ready you're basically losing dps haunt is an 8 second cooldown ability and the debuff lasts 12 seconds the only important thing here is a hundred percent uptime during the fight of the debuff while casting it the least amount of times possible the reasoning for this is that the application damage of haunt is very very little it does actual bad damage compared to you casting shadow bolts other than that using your procs from trinkets profession etc to the full list is also a massive dps gain getting up the afflic unstable affliction right before the spell power buff fades and stuff like that you know do not recast an unstable affliction while it has half of this duration left though that's not very efficient you basically never want to reapply on simplification before it runs out there's only very very niche situations where you actually want to do that like there might be situations where if you do not apply it right before it runs out you will not get a second chance to do it the boss will run away it will face out you know stuff like that you might see a scenario where your corruption is about to fall off and you can't refresh it in time with your haunt or shadowbolt in this scenario a great way to maintain your high roll corruption is to quickly cast any drain life drained soul and then cancelling it instantly to resume your normal rotation this wouldn't be a full min max video if i didn't cover everything so i am going to be mentioning flame caps even as an affliction warlock flame caps gives you 80 fire spell power for one minute and yes you personally don't gain anything from that since you don't use any fire spells however this additional fire spell power grants your pets increased stats and makes your fel hunter do more damage we are not talking about a crazy amount of dps increase but it is however a dps increase let's also talk about the curse of agony curse of agony is very special as it starts slow off in damage per tick and then ramps up in damage so applying it without being able to enjoy the full duration of it is often bad this is also backed up by the most recent and up-to-date affliction warlock sims this is also true even in the execute phase which is exactly what we're going to be discussing next so for the most crucial part of the entire affliction rotation d execute execute is where you really really shine now as an affliction warlock so obviously we're going to see what we can do to min max the execute phase and absolutely destroy the damage meter there is no better feeling than the filthy death knights or rogues i think they won the fight and then you enable the turbo in execute phase and destroy them the biggest thing i am usually asked regarding the execute phase is whether or not we still keep up all our dots during it and yes you want to keep up your dots because the tabling called soul siphon that increases the damage of your drain spells the more affliction debuffs you have on the target however you skip curse of agony if you cannot get full or close to full duration of it it's a dps loss actually this is of course also backed up by smart people and their mathematics and also the latest affliction warlock sim 2. i'll leave a link in the description down below so you can use this sim tool to see the rotation slash execute phase etc from the sim point of view during the execute phase it of it is of great importance that you keep your shadow embrace stacks at three and never let them fall off you maintain this debuff with your haunt and nothing else if you let your shadow embrace debuffs fall off you will incur a massive dps loss all right so we got the dot uptime covered and established that agony isn't all that amazing this next segment of the execute phase is what distinguishes the top warlocks from the middle of the pack warlocks and that is snapshotting your drain soul most of you watching this video probably knows what snapshotting is but to the more unexperienced i shall quickly explain it basically if you apply an unstable affliction with 5 000 spell power on cast and then a couple seconds later you drop down to let's say 3 000 spell power that onset reflection will still keep the original 5 000 spell power because you snapshot at the spell power if you want a deeper explanation of it you'll have to look it up yourself sadly as an in-depth explanation of snapshotting will just take far too long so of course i wouldn't be mentioning snapshotting if it wasn't vital to our execute phase and primarily the drained soul if you start the channel of your drained soul with like let's say dying curse proc eradication proc tricked of trade power infusion you name it it keeps those buffs for its entire duration because of this sometimes it might be in your best interest to look at actually clipping your unstable affliction before its last tick to instantly apply haunt as it's ready etc the reasoning for this is let's say you have three seconds left on your dying curse proc together with an eradication proc you want to use those three seconds to reapply a on simplification that has about let's say it has like three four seconds left and then you instantly fire off your haunt as it's um being done all this you can do in like let's say two seconds with these procs and then you will use your drained soul with like a second left on your dying curse and eradication allowing you to sit there and channel an almost full duration drain soul that is super juiced up and you lose no downtime on dots massive damage will be achieved like this even better is if you also fit in a little potion speed here since potion of speed is your best potion for execute phase as drain soul can not crit however i must clarify something when it comes to affliction warlock execute phase and a lot of it is that you have to make split second decisions um which makes it hard to make an actual script for what you must do in every scenario you have so many procs you have external cooldowns pots ratios you name it it's so hard to always say what you must do in each scenario even i who has played affliction warlock for so many years on lich king cannot make a script for it there's just too many scenarios it would take me weeks to write it out so go into it with a logical thinking look at your procs track your internal cooldowns with recourse or stuff like that and set up the good fat drain source an important very very important factor when you're playing a friction warlock is to get a casting bar that shows when your drained soul deals damage the reasoning for this is because you don't want to cancel your drained soul channel just before it gets another tick to reapply your dots for example massive dps loss is caused by that what you generally want to aim for is if you see that you need to reapply your dots you stop your drain sole channel right after it has ticked to optimize your time during the execute phase alright that should cover the execute phase and what to do in order to min max it if you have any questions about this face the best way to get them answered is in the comments down below in my discord or to catch me live on twitch i'll happily answer any questions you have there is no such thing as stupid questions alright that was quite a mouthful all this corruption rolling snapshotting execute etc but don't worry i saved the most stressful and difficult part of affliction warlock for last the multi target affliction warlock rotation now do not worry too much this is not something that is relevant for that many bosses and the same basic rules apply for multi-dotting as it does for a normal single target rotation if you have two targets that are equally important to kill and some examples for this could be coligorn in ulduar perhaps four horsemen in next 25 uh three dragon obsidian sanctum where you go for the tactic of killing the dragons the beasts of northrend fight in trial crusader here i specifically talk about phase two of the first boss the worms and if you want to be really advanced we have like the twin valkyrs where you can multi-dot roll your corruption but that in itself is an entire video for the future don't worry about that just yet i will keep it as simple and plainly as possible i am a firm believer that normal affliction warlock gameplay is the second hardest rotation to play in litzking only thing harder is being the feral druid but when it comes to multi target affliction truly does become the hardest back to play and to really master in my experience an example of how to multi-dot well on two targets that are equally important to kill is to do your normal rotation on your target one and then on target two you would roll your corruption like you would normally on target one you will keep up your unstable affliction you keep up your curse of agony and then you keep rolling the corruption with a shadow bolt on your second target while also maintaining the three shadow embrace stacks the way that i do it is to set my target 2 as focused target to easily track my dots on the second target while never swapping away from our main target the easiest way to do that is to set up focus casting macros i'm not saying my way is the best way but for me personally i found it's what works the best if i were you i would try different styles to see what works the best for me it is hard to get more in depth about multi-targeting than this perhaps i will make a video when lisking is actually out where i can show you guys my playstyle and comment on how i multi-target the best i know that some people prefer to set up weak auras to track all your buffs and debuffs on like seeing different targets that is one of the ways you could explore with how it works the best for you alright that has been quite a mouthful for you guys and god bless you if you're still here with me to round off the video i thought i would share my helpful macros that i use on my warlock for wrath of lich king instead of writing them all on the screen i thought it'd be easier for me to just add them in description down below and i will also be adding them to my discord server the invite link is in the description down below the helpful macros includes like focus macros mouse over macros trinket or racial usage you know stuff like that i also have every single weak order you might have seen during this video on my discord including a detailed list of all the add-ons i also use for my user interface you might have spotted that my user interface have been different throughout the video and that is because i couldn't set it up as i prefer to on the beta for lich king but everything from my current user interface is on the discord and that's it ladies and gentlemen i have now covered all that i think is important regarding what an advanced affliction warlock guide should include if you feel like i missed anything or you have any questions at all feel free to ask questions in the comments down below on my discord or when i'm live on twitch.tv take note tv if you stuck around till the end i really hope that you liked it if you did end up liking it don't be afraid to like the video and subscribe to the channel if you do that it will motivate me to do more videos like this in the future until then take care guys and good luck in wrath of the lich king

Channel: TakenoteTV

Views: 78,065

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Id: uHEAEfafAOs

Length: 27min 30sec (1650 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 17 2022